


But the Song's the Same

by Vitreous_Humor



Category: Avengers, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 03:30:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vitreous_Humor/pseuds/Vitreous_Humor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The idea was to bring together a group of of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. </p>
<p>The truth is that some people were just born for trouble. </p>
<p>The millionaire playgirl at the top of the world, one of the few male graduates of the Black Widow program, and  America's most patriotic master assassin are just the start of it. There's also the carnie turned super soldier, the golden boy with truly breathtaking anger issues, and Asgard's surprisingly gentle warrior prince.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But the Song's the Same

Her great-grandfather changed his name when he came to the United States in 1901. Because of that, she had never been Natalie Romanov, or she supposed, Natasha Romanov. Instead she was Natalie Rushman, daughter of Howard and Olivia Rushman. Howard never allowed good potential to sit, so while she had movie-star good looks from her movie-star mother, she also received an engineering degree and hours and hours of practical experience in the indulgent labs of Rushman Industries.

She wasn't wild. She was clever instead, which her mother thought far more dangerous, and if Natalie spent her early teens wandering in and out of national and private databases with less than a feather's touch, no one was the wiser. 

Olivia Rushman breathed a silent sigh of relief when Natalie met Air Force Academy cadet Virginia Potts while she was at school. Natalie learned from her parents, but it was Virginia that she wanted to impress, and if impressing the strict, serious freckled cadet from New Jersey meant actually going to the charity balls and behaving herself, so be it. Virginia gave Natalie restraint, and Natalie gave Virginia a final polish before the latter went on to pursue a military career. Time and distance separated them, but coldness never could, and Natalie knew she would have a friend for life. 

Sometimes she wrote her code while wearing a sequined evening gown, but she never showed up at high society functions with a single smudge of grease on her hands. She charmed men and women into her bed with a single cool smile, and she had JARVIS show them the door before they even thought of coming close to her workshop. If Rhodey pressed his lips together and sighed the morning after, well, a bonus and that famous Rushman smile would usually get Natalie off the hook with her ever-responsible, ever-irritated personal assistant.

On the good days, she believed her own press. She was the genius billionaire playgirl on top of the world, and she delighted in the joke of the beautiful socialite being one of the most clever mechanical minds in her generation behind closed doors. On the bad days, well, her family was Russian after all. She took a dark pride in the amount of vodka she could put away and wondered what her father would have thought of her. He was an immigrant's son, and he knew the value of masks, but sometimes she wondered if she had covered her tracks too well.

It was Afghanistan that showed her that she had not covered them nearly well enough. 

The Jericho missile was her darling from start to finish. From launch until detonation, it was undetectable via conventional means, but once detonation occurred, the damage could be seen for miles. She insisted on being in Afghanistan to see its debut, and she ignored the men who called it a silly rich bitch's whim.

She knew that before the Americans came to the mountainous land, it had been the Russians. Neither side of her heritage had taken this country; instead it took her, putting shards of metal in her chest and hooking her to a car battery for the rest of what could be her very short life.

The old black despair, her Russian soul, her father had called it, threatened to overwhelm her, but instead, something opened its eyes in that darkness, and those eyes were the blue of palladium. To put it another way, she was Natalie fucking Rushman, and they had just put everything she needed in her hands.

The cave in Afghanistan stripped her, tore away all the illusions she had ever had about who she was and what she did. She couldn’t be blind anymore, and she couldn’t be vulnerable, either. She understood the power of her weapons, but never more so than when she clad herself in armor and ripped through steel doors as if they were paper. She could have gone for stealth. She would later on. Now, though, her heart cried out for fire, for vengeance, and her escape from the caves was a revelation in violence. She had crafted weapons all her adult life; she had never thought that she was one. 

The day she came back to her lab, she started work, and in the space of two months, she had created the Mk I armor, red and black like a Faberge dream, and then she returned to Afghanistan. It felt good to rip into those men, to blow their operations up sky-high, but even better, she had faith in her own work again. No one was ever going to use her tech to cause that kind of damage again, no one except her, and though she was aware of the irony, she didn’t care.

After that, she went quiet. The suit stayed red and black, but there were stealth modes, ones that allowed her to hitch rides on military aircraft without them every noticing she was there and to do some kind of good without ever tipping her hand. 

She could have continued like that for years, she figured, but Stane's betrayal forced her into the open again. The stealth modes malfunctioned, leaving the suit working at half-power, shields down and bleeding red and black into the California sky for everyone with a smartphone to record and see.. 

It wasn’t like the suit had breasts. After the incident with Obadiah Stane, the press dubbed her Iron Man, and when she took the podium at the press conference, the name rang in her head like a bell, louder and louder until she gave in at last.

“I am Iron Man,” she said with something like her old cool smile, and she knew that she would sleep through the night like she hadn’t since Afghanistan.


End file.
